Why this is the most neglected work in link building
Everything else on this site is about persuading other people to link to you. This page is about the links already inside your own site, and it is the only category where you hold every variable: which pages link to which, what the anchor text says, how many links a page receives, and how deep a page sits from the homepage.
The neglect is easy to explain. Internal links feel like housekeeping, they produce no email you can forward to a client, and no vendor sells them because there is nothing to sell. Meanwhile a team will spend three months and a substantial budget chasing eight external links while a hundred pages on their own site sit two clicks from nowhere.
Consider the asymmetry directly. An external link takes weeks of outreach, arrives at somebody else's discretion, carries anchor text you did not choose, and has a median lifespan of about 1,080 days before it disappears. An internal link takes a minute, arrives when you decide, carries exactly the anchor you wrote, and lasts until you change it. If someone offered you unlimited links with those properties from an external site, you would take the deal immediately.
What internal links actually do
Four distinct functions, and they are worth separating because they call for different work.
Discovery. Crawlers find pages by following links. A page with no internal links pointing at it may be found through a sitemap, but it is a weak and inconsistent route. Internal links are how a crawler builds its picture of your site.
Distribution. Whatever ranking credit arrives at your site from outside flows onward through your internal links. In practice this means the pages you link to most from strong pages are the pages best positioned to rank. On the reference profile discussed throughout this site, the top hundred referring domains accounted for 84.3% of all links, and one domain alone sent 16.8% — external equity arrives concentrated at a handful of entry points, and internal linking is the mechanism that spreads it anywhere else.
Context. Internal anchor text and the surrounding sentence tell a search engine what a page is about, in your own words, consistently, across as many pages as you like. This is the same signal external anchors provide, except you are allowed to be deliberate about it.
Navigation. Real readers follow these links. A well-linked site reads better, holds attention longer, and answers the next question before it is asked. This benefit does not depend on any search engine behaving in any particular way, which makes it the one I would defend the investment on.
Architecture: depth, hubs and clusters
Depth is the number of clicks from the homepage to a page. Shallower is better, within reason. A page five clicks deep is crawled less often, receives less internal equity, and is usually harder for a human to find. The common rule of thumb is that important pages should sit within three clicks of the homepage. It is a rule of thumb, not a law, but if a commercially important page is six clicks down, that is a structural fact worth fixing before you build a single external link to it.
Hub pages are the practical remedy. A hub is a page that covers a topic broadly and links out to every page treating a part of it in depth, with those pages linking back to the hub. This is often called a topic cluster or a hub-and-spoke structure. The hub becomes the natural target for external links about the topic, and it distributes what it receives across every page beneath it.
The structure has a second advantage that is easy to miss. It makes gaps visible. When you lay out a hub and find that four of the eleven subtopics have no page to link to, you have found your content plan for the quarter without any keyword tool.
Site-wide navigation — header, footer, breadcrumbs — is internal linking too, and it is the part most likely to be inherited rather than designed. Breadcrumbs in particular are cheap, help both crawlers and readers understand hierarchy, and are frequently absent.
Contextual links and internal anchor text
A contextual internal link sits inside a sentence in the body of a page, placed because a reader at that point might genuinely want the other page. These are worth more than navigational links for a simple reason: they carry meaning. The surrounding sentence tells a search engine why the two pages are related, and a reader who clicks one is following an interest rather than hunting for a menu item.
Anchor text internally is where the largest easy gain sits. Externally, choosing anchors is how profiles get themselves into trouble. Internally, being deliberate is correct and expected — you are describing your own pages to your own readers, and nobody is being deceived. Use the phrase that genuinely describes the destination. Use it consistently across the site. Stop using "click here", which describes nothing and helps nobody, including the reader using a screen reader who hears a list of links stripped of context.
Two mistakes to avoid. The first is linking every occurrence of a phrase, which makes a page unreadable and dilutes the value of each link. Once per page, at the most useful moment, is plenty. The second is automated internal linking plugins configured to insert links on keyword matches — these reliably produce links inside quotes, inside headings, and pointing at the page the reader is already on. Use them for suggestions, never for insertion.
Orphan pages and crawl paths
An orphan page has no internal links pointing at it from anywhere on the site. Orphans are more common than anyone expects, and they arrive through the same handful of routes every time: pages created and never added to navigation, old campaign landing pages, pages that lost their only link during a redesign, paginated archives that stopped being generated, and anything published by a system that does not surface its own output.
Finding them requires two data sources, because a crawler alone cannot do it. Crawl the site to get every page reachable by following links, then pull every URL from the sitemap, the server logs, or analytics. Any URL in the second set that does not appear in the first is an orphan. Then make a decision on each: link it properly, redirect it, or remove it. Leaving it is also a decision, and usually the wrong one.
Crawl paths are the routes a crawler takes through the site, and they can be wasted. Faceted navigation generating thousands of filter combinations, session parameters, endless paginated archives and internal links to redirected or dead URLs all consume crawl attention that could have gone to pages you care about. On a small site this rarely matters. On a large site it matters a great deal, and the first symptom is usually new pages taking a long time to appear in the index.
One habit worth building: after any migration or redesign, re-crawl and compare the internal link graph to the one before. Redesigns break internal links silently and at scale, and nobody notices for months.
A practical first pass
If you have never audited internal linking, this sequence takes a day on most sites and finds more than it has any right to.
- Crawl the site and export every page with its inbound internal link count and its click depth from the homepage.
- Find the orphans by comparing that crawl against your sitemap and analytics. Fix or remove each one.
- Find your most important pages — commercially, or by the external links they have attracted — and check how many internal links each receives. The mismatch is almost always stark.
- Find your strongest pages by external links received, and check what they link to internally. This is where concentrated external equity either flows onward or stops.
- Fix the anchor text on links to your priority pages so they describe the destination consistently.
- Build the missing hubs for topics where you have many pages and no page tying them together.
None of this requires anyone's permission, none of it decays, and none of it carries risk. That combination does not exist anywhere else in link building. Do it before the outreach, not after — otherwise the links you work so hard to earn arrive at a site that cannot distribute them.
Questions
How many internal links should a page have?
Enough to be useful and no more. There is no numeric limit worth defending; the old figure of a hundred links per page came from an era of crawl constraints that no longer apply. The practical test is readability: if a paragraph has four links in it, a reader cannot tell which one matters. On a long reference page, a few dozen contextual links spread across the whole document is entirely reasonable.
Do internal links pass PageRank?
Internal links distribute ranking credit through a site in the same mechanical way external links distribute it between sites — that is how a link graph works, and your site is part of the graph. What they cannot do is create credit from nothing. Internal linking determines where whatever you have received ends up, which is why it multiplies the value of external links rather than substituting for them.
What anchor text should I use for internal links?
Descriptive text that says what the destination is about, used consistently across the site. This is the one place where deliberate anchor text is correct rather than risky, because you are describing your own pages to your own readers. Avoid "click here" and "read more" — they help nobody, including visitors using screen readers, who hear link text without surrounding context.
How do I find orphan pages?
Crawl your site to list every page reachable by following links, then compare that list against every URL you know exists from your sitemap, server logs and analytics. Anything in the second list but not the first is orphaned. A crawler alone cannot find them, because by definition it has no path to reach them.